Hidden Treasures

What do you mean by "keyholders"?
The Afghan curatorial system is based on individuals who actually have a sort of ownership of these objects. They're bonded to these objects. If anything happened to one of these artifacts, they were personally responsible. It's an ancient curatorial system that probably goes to back to the Ottomans or before.

So you had separate keyholders for separate groups of artifacts?
That's absolutely right. And if that keyholder disappears, the key disappears. That was one of our issues in terms of rediscovering these items.

Some of these people were from the museum, some from ministries?
Some were from the museum, some were from the National Bank. We didn't know all those years that these objects were hidden away beneath a building of the National Bank of Afghanistan. The people who knew were from these two groups, and a select group from outside. Between war, chaos, bullets flying, 5 million people leaving Afghanistan—including many of the intellectuals—this group of people decided to stay. Some of those I spoke to stayed in part for family reasons; some stayed to preserve their country's heritage.

Why didn't the Taliban rulers, when they took over, think to open the presidential vaults?
Maybe they did. But we believe that this code of secrecy meant that they didn't know about these specific museum treasures, and they hadn't fully explored the vaults. And the demise of the Taliban came incredibly quickly. It was like Dorothy's house falling on the Wicked Witch of the East.

You were there when the vaults and lockboxes were opened. Can you tell me about that?
It was a magical, amazing set of days. We learned about these boxes in 2003, when President Karzai announced there were some museum boxes in the presidential bank vault. It took a couple of months to figure out what to do. It was at that time that I found out that the keyholders of certain collections were gone. The minister of finance and the minister of culture suggested we do a scientific inventory of these boxes. I had to go back to the U.S. and convince the National Geographic Society to fund that. It was only in April 2004 that I was able to return. I brought the vice president of the National Geographic Society. We went to the bank vault, and we waited. [Laughs] It was a kind of an awkward moment for me, but it turned out that the keys to the lockboxes were really lost. We waited until we got a presidential decree from Karzai saying we could open the boxes [by other means]

How long did that take?
It was a long and grueling experience. We thought everything was set. But we waited for a week, 10 days. Finally, that fateful day came, and we must have had 30 or 40 people jammed into the basement of this bank vault. A very small room.